Occupy Walk Street has me wondering that question. I don’t think it’s the point of OWS and I don’t think that question is necessarily being asked by OWS. However, the group, by calling itself Occupy Wall Street, has made Wall Street a primary target, and I think that when you get to the heart of it, Wall Street is more aligned with OWS goals than might be immediately apparent.
OWS is a mixed bag, so i’m really only looking at how it, as a movement, relates to Wall Street. The pitch is essentially that Wall Street is made of the 1% of the country’s wealthiest, and the rest of us are getting hosed. But what if there were no wall street? No stock markets? No public ownership?
Wall Street, however flawed it may be, is a vehicle for breaking up concentrations of wealth. If we didn’t have public ownership, things would probably be a lot less equal than they are today. The only ownership would be private, in a system more like venture capital – a world far more exclusive than Wall Street. Wall Street actually gives the 99%, or at least some percent above 1, an actual chance at ownership.
So, I look at OWS and ask why would the group attack Wall Street? And it’s really about what was promised – the chance for wealth to be less concentrated – and what was actually delivered – still a pretty big disparity in wealth. But it really has very little to do with what Wall Street should, and to some extent does, represent – a way for more people to invest.
The narrative is changing a bit, but when OWS was first discussed, I feel like all that I read was that this was a group of semi-radicals with no organization and no clear message. The message is getting refined, it’s about reform. It’s about rules catching up with the changes in society. It’s about the fact that the internet has given a voice to everyone, but our government wants to pretend that we still need the same representative system… when our representatives look less and less like the people they represent. How a name like Occupy Wall Street makes sense in that context, I really have no idea.